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There’s a huge battle brewing. Secret negotiations are taking place. There’s big money at stake, and what’s clear is how we consume sports is going to change. And while we’re not specifically talking about the Morgan Stanley/MLSE sale news, no matter what happens it is definitely going to have a giant impact.

Canada’s sports media landscape is currently being reshaped as CTV’s TSN and Rogers Sportsnet prepare to take each other on all fronts. CBC and The Score are trying to remain valiant in the face of giants, but the first two have been very active, hiring people, locking up long-term rights deals to sporting events and launching new endeavours in an attempt to satiate the seemingly endless appetite for sports. In talking the past few weeks with everyone from sports reporters to some of Canada’s most well-connected media business people, everyone knows that a sports media fight is upon us. This past weekend’s MLSE auction admission confirms that a much coveted chip is definitely in play.

With media folks, it’s often likened to the newspaper wars of the late ’90s when the National Post entered the market and the result was everybody raised their game. That fuels the optimistic point of view that no matter what happens, we as the unfederated union of couch potatoes will win with more options to watch what we love. The pessimists say this is another way we’ll get screwed and those fighting corporations will find ways for us to pay more to watch what we love.

“It’s a heightened atmosphere because clearly the Rogers Corporation has put more focus on sports. That’s pretty obvious,” says Phil King, President of Sports and Executive Vice-President of Programming, CTV Inc. “But we’ve just been bought by Bell, which is going to put a double emphasis on sports. So the competition is at many levels. Yes, its sports playing out, but it is also CTV versus City and Bell and Rogers. Our internet sites versus theirs. Radio versus radio.”

Today we’re going to focus on TSN because any way you slice it, they are the current leader in the clubhouse. One third owned by ESPN and just over 25 years old, they are first — and on Friday, their PR department sent out a “Midseason Report Card” release crowing about it (so if you want to know how kick-ass they are, just ask them) — although they face some very interesting times ahead.

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In the past few months, they have locked up the rights to the Tour de France, the next two Euro cups, and the national rights to MLS soccer. They wrestled the NCAA men’s basketball tourney away from The Score, and in exactly one month, they launch TSN Radio, which is new territory, bringing Mike Richards back from Calgary as host of the morning show.

In terms of other hires, Luke Wileman and Jason deVos are their new duo covering soccer, and they recently brought ESPN’s Dan Shulman back into the fold. There’s also recently added Steve Kouleas, who is going to pull double duty, manning the noon-hour show on TSN Radio called That’s Hockey 2 Day in addition to hosting That’s Hockey 2 Nite on TSN2. King and Stewart Johnston, president of TSN, say there’s only more to come.

It’s easy to see why sports content is so important. It remains impervious to the challenges that are fragmenting traditional media. It’s the definition of appointment viewing, making it close to PVR-proof and remains hard to pirate — although there are many that try.

It’s also telling that both King and Keith Pelley, president of Rogers Media, are also in charge of conventional programming on their respective sides, so the heads of content at these giant media companies both have sports backgrounds. Much has been made of the personal dynamic at the heart of this rivalry, as Pelley went to Rogers from TSN, although in reality it’s a bit like coaching trees in the NFL. King says that most people in the sports biz these days have come through TSN, just like the previous generation went through the CBC.

“Our biggest problem in the past is that we couldn’t fit stuff in. The shelves were full and that enabled our current competitors to get to a certain level because we just couldn’t get everything in,” says King, who came up through scheduling and acquisitions and has a reputation as a tough negotiator.

Even with the addition of two-year-old TSN2, there might not be enough room for all they want to show.

“We knew when we were adding the NCAA men’s basketball tourney, our March schedule between hockey and basketball is unbelievably tight,” admits Johnston. Not to mention tennis, golf, racing — the list goes on.

We all have a different hierarchy of what sports we want to see. The past two months have seen curling fans complain about their sport being aired on TSN2 or completed matches streamed on its website. The fear is that by buying the rights to so many sports, scheduling conflicts will only get worse and things will be shown on delay — which is where the value of sports’ immediacy becomes as much a problem as an asset, because as fans we want things live and direct on our flat screens in our man caves.

The digital moves are what really interest me. I’m a tech guy and I want more options. I already usually watch games with an open laptop or while reading instant reaction on Twitter on my iPhone. Canada generally lags behind the U.S. in terms of everything digital (except ironically, broadband penetration), and in a perfect cross-border comparison, CBS is streaming all the NCAA tourney games in the U.S. on iPads and iPhones for free. TSN is streaming just the first round games on its site.

Radio is going to be a big story next month, and we’ll obviously be listening, but it’s how the digital shakes out that I am most curious about with TSN. Their site is the No. 1 sports site in Canada, but it’s comprised of columns from their personalities and plenty of news wire copy. The word is that they are in writer-hiring mode as well. King says that hopefully in the next 12 months we’ll see more content on mobile devices, although giving it away for free isn’t part of the business plan.

Admittedly, TSN is facing industry-wide concerns on that front, but since they are the leader, it’s only fair to ask them to lead.

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